Camp Coffee began production in Glasgow in 1876. It contains
water, sugar, 4% coffee essence and 26% chicory essence.

In certain moods, I think it tastes
better than standard coffee, being sweeter and less bitter.
It has long served as a cheap substitute for the real
thing and, thus, is spoken of disparagingly by dedicated
posers. It is very useful for making coffee ice cream
for children, with less of the caffeine.

The original bottle label, with the Scots officer
served Camp coffee by a Sikh orderly.

Intermediate label, the orderly no longer offering
the coffee on a tray.

Current label illustration with the orderly and
officer sitting together to drink Camp coffee.

And here is a rather boring side story.

There is a strange tale of a British
soldier winning a Victoria Cross and and being offered
a commission as an alternative to the medal. He took the
commission, later becoming a general - Major-General Sir
Hector MacDonald, and was then accused of being a homosexual.
He, therefore, committed suicide.

It is alleged that the general is the
model of the British frontier soldier on the product label.
Supposedly, this ‘explains’ why ‘camp’
is linked to homosexuality. This sounds very much like
an urban legend to me.

It is nonsense that internet
news sources and commentators are amateurs by comparison
with the fossil news publications. Every time a fracas
breaks out, the net privateers are well ahead of the curve
and the fossil media follows.

Over and over, the fossil media gives
out politicians’ handouts without pointing out the
severe dishonesty and often innumeracy in such sources.

The fossil media lives on puff handouts
(‘news releases’) from corporations, politicians, academics
and a very small number of (similarly lazy) news ‘services’.

The fossil media repeats the same ‘stories’
by cut and paste in (literally) hundreds of rags, whether
on paper or on the net.

The fossil media has text mainly to
sweeten advertising.

There is nothing the independent writers
cannot provide, and better. If any fossil media source
tries charging for their internet version, they will rapidly
lose readership, and thereby advertising, while others
will cheer that another fossil source is self-destructing
and leaving more of the market to them.

The fossil media is derivative and
doomed. It is also one-way.

The world is a’changing. The
old framework is crumbling!

For those that still believe that individual
bloggers, supported by not much more that Google ads,
are little competion for well-resourced news gathering
organisation, consider the following:

There is nothing stopping bloggers
combining.

One person with intelligence can
easily outperform the fossil media and the lazy dull
hacks by choosing areas of interest and researching
them effectively.

A great deal of what has driven
the fossil media is not conventional profits, but power.
Take, for instance, the BBC.

Any greater outreach capabilities provided
by the web is a passing phase. The competition will continue
to consume the fossil media. ☺

It is doubtful that any fossil media
will be able to profit royally by becoming an internet-centred
media company because the competition for power is so
great. The web is characterised by the huge numbers coming
on line year by year.

And that looks to me like a world of
specialists. In a political newsgroup, for instance, there
are specialists in military equipment and other backwaters
who know vastly more than the average hack, or even than
most of the present ‘New’ Labour politicians.

In my view, the fossil media they will
be cut into a thousand pieces on the web. the notion that
they can finance themselves through advertisings and direct
sales ignores that advertising will be spread ever more
thinly, and direct selling will increasingly intrude and
so be ignored.

I can buy books on the web that, in
the past, would, have taken me months to locate, if at
all, and at far lower prices.

Just about everything is going that
way. This technology is changing society in fundamental
ways, just as did printing, the horseless carriage, nuclear
power and the birth control pill.

Why pay for badly reported news on
reprocessed dead trees when the internet gives a better
breadth of news reporting and ideas? Why pay for advertising
in biased and unpopular fossil printing when the net is
the growing audience?

“The Times and Sunday Times are losing a million
pounds a week. The New York Times is selling and renting
back its own headquarters to stay solvent. Guardian
Media Group is losing £83,000 a day...”
[Quoted from order-order.com]

“Times Newspapers, publisher of The Times and
Sunday Times, reported that losses jumped 17% from £43.9
million to £51.3 million in the year to 29 June
2008 - before the collapse of Lehman Brothers and recession
hit the advertising market.” [Quoted from thisislondon.co.uk]

“The Guardian and The Observer lost £26.8
million before various one-off write-offs in the year
to March 2008.” [Quoted from timesonline.co.uk]

“Newspaper publisher Independent News & Media's
annual profit turned into a loss in 2008 as the health
of the newspaper industry continued to worsen.”
[Quoted from bbc.co.uk]

Why kill trees when you can read the news digitally?

“The New York Times Company and Washington Post
Company are launching pilots with Kindle DX this summer”.
[Quoted from corporate-ir.net]